Wednesday, July 30, 2003

I don't need Gartner to tell me that more companies are buying consulting around web services - I just ask my sales team. And the news is good. More and more companies are calling us to kick off engagements.

The majority of what we are seeing right now is actually driven by the web service vendors. Companies that supply web service platforms, networks, security, transformation and management platforms have been asking us to help with client engagements. This is great news. It means that the product vendors are selling their products and the engagements are large enough to bring in hired guns.

We are also seeing new engagements where we are helping companies:
- Define a roadmap for becoming 'service oriented'
- Evaluate web service vendors & packages
- Integrate systems using web service technology
- Define corporate standards, policies and procedures around web services
- Educate internal staff on web service technologies

The most interesting area where we are getting involved is in helping companies create whole new methodologies around what we call a "Business Driven Architecture". Here, we discuss business strategy and measurements. This moves into identifying key business processes that they would like integrated / automated. We then spend time creating new artifacts to describe Digital Process Execution. From here, we create a service network to act as a substrate. Lastly, we 'service enable' legacy applications and orchestrate them to support the desired 'to be' business process.

It really feels good to give customers a BPM solution that is built the *right* way.

DefinitionsConcerns are the non-functional requirements (ilities if you will) - Scalability, Availability, etc.
Remedies are architectural components that attempt to resolve the concerns (clusters, etc.)

Webify, a company headed by Manoj Saxena (formerly of Exterprise; acquired by CommerceOne) has come out of stealth mode.

The company vision statement states:
"The promise of the Internet is an open e-business platform where companies can do business spontaneously with anyone, anywhere, anytime. Business Services Networks fulfill that vision.

We envision every company publishing standards based business services and processes that customers and business partners can discover and self-provision into their own business processes with a few clicks of a mouse. Companies will build on each other's services, creating new loosely coupled applications and industry-transforming, network-centric business models."

Webify is Austin based - and a neighbor of mine. I had a chance to speak with Manoj a few months back and I think he gets it. It is interesting to see that he is bypassing the 'chasm' theory though. I'll have to ask him why he is attacking FiServ, Health & MFG all at once.

It is also interesting to see how much they are basing their products around BPEL (and J2EE). I anticipate this to be a trend for some time to come. Webify has also had to harden the current IBM implementations to include early versions of reliability, security, isolation, etc.

Saturday, July 26, 2003

I had heard of Blue Titan from their web advertisements but had lumped them into the 'web service management' space along with AmberPoint and friends. Their more recent product literature describes their offering in the 'web service fabric' space - which really is a distinct category.

Now, I haven't used the product - but it looks like it sits on top of Web Logic and leverages an Oracle database. This means that it is more than just 'a set of libraries'. It has a library that a service designer would incorporate into their services and it has servers. It is a full blown closed-loop web service management enforcement product.

So, why would they call it a 'fabric'? My best guess is that unlike other products the service management substrate must be built into the software that you are building. It is not an add-on (servlet filter) or a bump on the network (promiscuous sniffer). By providing a library, they are able not only to listen and monitor, but also to control and resolve. Assuming I got the product concept right - it sounds like a good idea.

This raises an interesting question, "what is a service fabric?" I'll attempt to answer that later, for now I think it is safe to say that a fabric must be integrated into the code / services that the developer is writing. It isn't a passive bump or a container. It is an integrated library. Can the library depend on other well known servers / services (or must it be fully encapsulated)? In my opinion the answer is that it can (and often will) have outside dependencies that will be described via WSDL.

For now, I am going to call the Blue Titan offering a 'fabric based web service management platform'. This will distinguish them from the passive bumps and those that monitor via the run-time container (vm, app server, etc.). It is also clear that 'web service fabric' is too open-ended. The Blue Titan offering has some overlap with the TME GAIA, but I would not consider the two direct competitors.

Sunday, July 20, 2003

The ESB or Enterprise Service Bus seems to be the acronym of the quarter. I've been debating some ways to describe the ESB, here are some of my attempts:

"It is a means for a message queue company (like Sonic and Spirit) to make it seem like they do web services when they really spent the majority of their time doing JMS based queues."

or

"It is a cool sounding buzz-phrase that will lure not-so-smart software developers towards a Java API that sounds like it has something to do with web services. On occassion, they will re-describe the JMS API via WSDL!!!"

or

"Queuing companies realized that the message queue was essential in an asynchronous, document based service oriented network - thus, they created a cool phrase that steals from three predecessors ("Enterprise" from J2EE, "Service" from SOA, and "Bus" from either CORBA or hardware buses)."

Just kidding of course... but I do think it is a dumb term. For goodness sake, A BUS? Has anyone ever looked at the topology of a service network? :-)

Saturday, July 19, 2003

May 29, 2003--Wolfram Research is inviting users to try the beta version of its new Web Services Package, which allows users to interact with web services in Mathematica. With Web Services Package 1.0, Mathematica users can dynamically access new data and functionality located on the network, creating an automatic extension to the Mathematica environment. The release of Web Services Package is yet another demonstration of Wolfram Research's commitment to providing freely available, cutting-edge technology and support to fulfill the needs of the Mathematica community.

Wednesday, July 16, 2003

"WSE 2.0 Technology Preview builds on the security, routing, and attachments capabilities with new features including a policy framework, enhanced security model, message-based programming model, and support for multiple hosting environments. "

Saturday, July 12, 2003

Sean McGrath & John McDowall have touched on a subject that is important to me - the use of the dbms in the soa. Yes, one of my first jobs was working for an RDBMS vendor on the mainframe (Must Software - Nomad). Everything we did was based on the relational model. Everything COULD be done via a database (if we wanted to). Hell, you want two applications to share data?? Stick it in the database!!! We preached Boyce-Codd normal form, we used terms like "sargable predicates" and "shippable selects" - we were cool.

Well, we ended up misusing the database and creating ER-models that glued everything together. Later, the middleware people (CORBA, EJB) figured out how to front-end these meshed data-spaces with services, but they didn't actually un-screw the data normalization problem. The fact is that we use surrogate keys and auto-gen id's because they are efficient for the dbms and they are easier to use in our SQL. However, generally they are vendor specific and implementation specific. We all know that "Data Coupling" is the exposure of internal data to the external world, leading to the coupling of two distinct systems (failure to encapsulate internals). Want to see something funny? Take a look at the sForce web services api and see how they dealt with the issue. Ask yourself these questions:
1. Did they expose internal database Id's to the outside world?
2. Do they provide any queryable artifacts to access the constraints (e.g., I need a Customer record before I can insert a Customer Order record)
3. Do they provide ER-Diagrams (data view) or some new service view (activity / sequence) diagram?

After you look at these questions, you can begin to see some of the problems that will be surfacing in providing external access to internal data. The art of service enabling the db is still early - let's learn from sForce and advance the art.

I have a strong interest in web service frameworks. In general, I am of the opinion that the WSF is where MS & IBM wil have their next major battle. So, they HAVE to agree on a certain sub-set of functionality (those concerns which must be remedied at the protcol level), but beyond protocols, the field is open and the battle will begin shortly.

Right now, Sun has a set of api's that they call J2EE (JMS, JNDI, etc.) They expose each of these api's in a "java only" format. Microsoft has a similar set of api's on the .Net side. In my opinion, we will quickly be moving to the exposure of technical architectural elements as web services (web services front ending LDAP, web services front ending databases, etc.) We will also see web services frameworks for horizontal domains (accounting, crm, etc.) and vertical domains (insurance, travel, etc.) Each of these horizontal and vertical frameworks will have to pick a substrate layer to work with.

One of the more interesting web service frameworks is GAIA from TME. I like the fact that TME knocked out a quick impl of a soap engine (glue) and are quickly moving into the substrate. They are looking at the world from a set of concerns (scalability, availability, deployability) and identifying remedies (balancing, resilience through redundancy, etc.) Many of the problems that GAIA takes on are concerns that either were done in proprietary hardware (cisco stuff) or concerns that were handled in a monolithic app server (availability through clustering). I am a huge fan of re-addressing these remedies via a consistent web services approach. Using a balancing web service, or a caching web service inside of an orchestration makes a lot of sense.

Other frameworks have popped up, but at a higher level. One such framework is the sForce web services api from salesforce.com. The sForce api is early. It provides some real basic services (insert, update, delete, change password, logon, etc.) You can really view this framework as a "data service" framework - and from this perspective, it does the job. Their choice to use a significant amount of abstract data types (records & maps) facilitates versioning and adding new data fields easily, but has the trade-off of potentially introducing typing errors at run-time. Sidenote: This framework looks a lot like the old MS My Services (aka Hailstorm).

Web service frameworks are now emerging. It shouldn't be long before MS & IBM throw one (or several) out. It will be nice to move beyond protocol crap (ws-boring, service substrate) and into value-add.